Customers call a company service call center with problems or questions about a product or service or to alter their existing service. When calling, customers typically speak to customer service representatives (CSR) or interact with self-service interactive voice response (SS-IVR) systems. Because of the cost associated with CSR time, companies are automating or partially automating the customer service functions and moving away from live CSRs. These automated systems that provide customer service functions without CSR contact have become important to many companies as a cost savings measure and increasingly popular with customers. As the use of SS-IVRs increases, SS-IVR technology has allowed for a more human like interaction between the customer and the SS-IVR through the use of speech recognition technology. Speech recognition allows the customers to speak responses to system prompts instead of pressing keys on the telephone keypad to respond. However, speech recognition is computationally demanding which can result in excessively long response times for the customers. Also, speech technology requires large capital expenditures on hardware at the company service call center. Because of the high volume of calls received at service centers and the high operating demands associated with using speech recognition, speech recognition technology is becoming a large capital intensive technology to implement.